Back when we interviewed Jeffrey Brown about his movie at Sundance, he mentioned an upcoming humor book called Darth Vader and Son that features gentle humor on the topic of Darth as dad to Luke.

Well, he’s now posted some cover sketches on his blog.

And here’s the final cover.

The book is out from Chronicle in May.

Lauren Weinstein offers helpful hints on how to interpret online profile pictures. More tips in the link.

You may have noticed Google’s stylish doodle for the birthday of Charles Dickens today. But who drew it? an artist named Mike Dutton, who has previously worked on doodles for Richard Scarry, Mary Blair, the Royal Wedding, and the World Cup.

Mike said that while he normally works on his tablet, he had to go back to a physical drawing board for the Dickens doodle, creating each character separately so that he could place them within different parts of the Google logo. Like an engineer, he likes to iterate on what he designs until he gets it right.

You can see more of Dutton’s work at his website, where he has a ton of charming illos and even a few comics posted.

Hoorah Big…Blue. Um. Anyway. As a Jets fan, The Beat doesn’t exactly root for the New Jersey Giants, but we are happy to see an area team triumph over its foes and represent Wall Street in the ticker tape parade category. So…YEAH. Butt in the backfield.

Meanwhile, irrepressible Lisa Hanawalt did some sketches of the game, including this:

The Puppy Bowl wasn’t so cute this year.

Rokuro Taniushi is a Japanese illustrator of the ’50s on who has been called “the kawaii Norman Rockwell of Japan” for painting some 1300 covers for the influential weekly magazine Shukan Shincho. Kawaii is the “cute” style of Japanese art, seen and deconstructed in everything from Hello Kitty to Murakami.

For more art, go to 50 Watts.

[Via Tim Hodler]

Giant Robot’s YEAR OF THE DRAGON art exhibit, themed around this year’s Chinese horoscope, is now online. It also serves as a farewell to BR employee Michelle Borok, who curated many exhibitions at the iconic LA store. You can view the entire exhibit here. Above, “Pink Mountains, Black Dragon” by Sara Saedi..

The artistic lineup:

Andrice Arp, Robert Bellm, Aaron Brown, Elliot Brown, Stasia Burrington, Bjorn Calleja, Ako Castuera, Sean Chao, Louise Chen, Shawn Cheng, James Chong, Luke Chueh, Chris Cilla, Jesse Fillingham, Cam Floyd, Harrison Freeman, Renee French, Gabe Gonzales, Kio Griffith, Joe Hahn, Nao Harada, Hiro Hayashi, David Horvath, Kerry Horvath, Martin Hsu, Mark Ingram, Mari Inukai, Elizabeth Ito, Marc Johns, Jeremiah LaTorre, Little Friends of Printmaking, Tessar Lo, Bradford Lynn, Miso, Gary Musgrave, Mark Nagata, Ming Ong, Martin Ontiveros, Sana Park, Sidney Pink, Jarrett Quon, Jesse Reklaw, Sara Saedi, Ryan Jacob Smith, Dave Stolte, Ken Taya, Edwin Ushiro, Christine Vincent, Steven Weissman, Heidi Woan, Yoskay Yamamoto, Jeni Yang, Yejin Oh, Sashiko Yuen

David Choe, the eccentric and talented graffiti artist/painter who once flamed out as the artist on an X-Men spin-off, is now set to make about $200 million from the Facebook stock offering. It seems that back in the day Choe painted murals for Facebook’s Palo Alto offices…and instead of taking a lump sum he asked for stock. As you may have heard, Facebook went public yesterday, and was quickly valued at $5 billion or so, making Choe’s little decision one of the savviest moves ever by an art-type. “Always double down on 11. Always,” Choe advises in a recent art book.

The payout to Mr. Choe, the graffiti artist, could provide more money from his paintings than Sotheby’s attracted for its record-breaking $200.7 million auction in 2008 for work by Damien Hirst. In 2005, Mr. Choe was invited to paint murals on the walls of Facebook’s first offices in Palo Alto, Calif., by Sean Parker, then Facebook’s president. As pay, Mr. Parker offered Mr. Choe a choice between cash in the “thousands of dollars,” according to several people who know Mr. Choe, or stock then worth about the same. Mr. Choe, who has said that at the time that he thought the idea of Facebook was “ridiculous and pointless,” nevertheless chose the stock. Many “advisers” to the company at that time, which is how Mr. Choe would have been classified, would have received about 0.1 to 0.25 percent of the company, according to a former Facebook employee. That may sound like a paltry amount, but a stake that size is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, based on a market value of $100 billion. Mr. Choe’s payment is valued at roughly $200 million, according to a number of people who know Mr. Choe and Facebook executives.

Mr. Choe’s page on Facebook shows the life of a modern-day renegade artist. Among the images of his graffiti, there is a trail of images of him partying with scantily clad women and spending large amounts of money on alcohol. In recent weeks, Mr. Choe promoted photos of a $40,000 bottle of alcohol; a single shot, he boasted, costs $888.

Choe has a blog post up at his website with images and videos of the murals and the making of them. We’d advise anyone about to engage in wrist slitting over this story consider the obverse: not that someone got a huge payout for just one job, but that such a payout is POSSIBLE if the stars align.

Anyway, godspeed to Mr. Choe. May he not spend all his loot in one place.

If you have been looking at comic art posts on the internet for long, you have probably at some time admired the intricate and imaginative illustrations of cartoonist Ulises Farinas and thought “How does he do it? Well, here’s how, in a detailed post on drawing a cover for Zupi magazine:

These are “finished” pencils for me. If you notice, there are some areas that are either blank or simply indicated with a few lines. No windows, blobby spots for creatures on rooftops, etc. I have a couple of reasons for not drawing those things, the main reason is a pencil can’t draw the lines i need when i get very tiny details. It will just be blurry and too many lines to follow makes inking more difficult. For some detailing, i simply have to figure out as i ink. Windows are different, i dont draw them, to keep the page clean. I dont like seeing too many lines, because i need to decide which lines are most important, and windows can sometimes just be indicated, not completely drawn, if they sit below another element on the page. Also, with the density of my inks, if i tried to match that with pencils, my pages get really grey and ugly.

Check link for bigger images and a chance to play “Spot the character.”

Artists Jim Rugg and Benjamin Marra have gone spelunking on the internet and discovered a fellow named Jason Karns, whose art is violent, sexualized, and mind bogglingly lively in that post-Al Feldstein/Mars Attacks/Dario Agento/Herschell Gordon Lewis way. Karns is interviewed at TCJ and here’s his blog — WARNING VERY VERY NSFW — which previews his flagship title: FUKITOR.

WARNING: If you are the kind of person offended by sexualized violence against woman you are not going to like these links.

Who the heck is Afu Chan? He drew a story in SPERA, the fantasy anthology by Josh Tierney that also sports art by Kyla Vanderklugt, Hwei, and Emily Carroll, and was published by Archaia. But a glance at his Deviant Art page reveals an illustrator very much in the modern, pan-comics Moebius-inspired vein, but with violent, pastel brawls breaking out all over the place.

Fresh.

Just the kind of thing to look at, at the end of a long day.

Starting with yesterday’s highly corporate We Can Be Heroes press conference, DC Comics/Entertainment has been rolling out its new logo. It’s seen briefly at the end of the WCBH video—but not in the eagerly awaited animated form, alas.

It’s also now in use on the DC website, as on the Source Blog.

Hm. This logo really does need to jump up and dance around. Otherwise, it tends to be swallowed up by the other elements on the page.

Every once in a while Marvel likes to get cultural by commissioing a bunch of variant covers in the style of great paintings. they’ve just done this with April’s Avengers Art Appreciation Variants, which will whet your appetite for both the Avengers movie AND a trip to the local museum. Alex Maleev, Michael Kaluta, Gabriele Dell’Otto, Greg Horn, Gerald Parel and more channel Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Monet, Pollock, and Egon Schiele (one ‘l’). Which one do you like best?

Among our favorites, Charles Paul Wilson III’s Ernest Thompson take off for the Hulk and Joe Quinones doing Lautrec on Secret Avengers.

 
AGE OF APOCALPSE #2
Variant Cover by CHRISTIAN NAUCK


AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #683
Variant Cover by MIKE DEL MUNDO
 

AVENGERS #25 
Variant Cover by GABRIELE DELL’OTTO
 

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE #2
Variant Cover by STEPHANIE HANS
 

DAREDEVIL #11
Variant Cover by STEFFI SCHUTZEE
 

FANTASTIC FOUR #605
Variant Cover by MICHAEL KALUTA
 

INCREDIBLE HULK #7
Variant Cover by CHARLES PAUL WILSON III
 

INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #515
Variant Cover by GREG HORN
 

SECRET AVENGERS #26
Variant Cover by JOE QUINONES
 

UNCANNY X-FORCE #24 
Variant Cover by JULIAN TOTINO
 

UNCANNY X-MEN #11
Variant Cover by GREG HORN
 

WINTER SOLDIER #4
Variant Cover by JOHN TYLER CHRISTOPHER
 

WOLVERINE #304
Variant Cover by Gurihiru
 

WOLVERINE & THE X-MEN #9
Variant Cover by ALEX MALEEV
 

X-MEN #27
Variant Cover by KHOI PHAM
 

Philip Bond drew a bunch of real-life female astronauts:

Working for months at a time just penciling a comic book I started these portraits to get a bit of inking and colouring out of my system. I shouldn’t say ‘portraits’, I’m not going for much of a likeness. Usually I’ll glance at a couple of photographs and then go off and draw a vague impression. Margaret Seddon is blonde, Judith Resnik is a bit barmy looking, that sort of thing.

So many layers of the awesome:

#1: So many lady astronauts!

#2: Philip Bond art!

#3: Cute Philip Bond Real Life Lady Astronauts!

These should have been trading cards.

[via Jah Furry]

And it makes him unhappy, writes artist Tim Kreider, who has just resumed weekly updates on his website.

The Society of Illustrators, an august institution long devoted to the now-vanishing artform of magazine illustration, has in recent years presented medals in the Sequential category for comics-type stuff. This year’s winners include a gold medal for GB Tran’s VIETNAMERICA and a silver medal for Brian Rea’s Modern Love, a series of illustrations for a NY Times column on romance.

Both artists are part of a show up at the Society’s NYC HQ until the 21st.